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Saturday, January 26, 2008

But maybe she could phrase it in a way that doesn't sound so dumb. In her own words:

And Latin America's runaway crime problem and rampant corruption has nothing to do with the fact that it is filled with Latin Americans. You just did it again!

Here is what I wrote:

You ask what the end game [of America's immigrant invasion] will look like, and I don't honestly know. At the optimistic end, I would say that a country full of Latin Americans will probably look a lot like . . . Latin America. Whatever its charm, Latin America is different in ways both large (rampant corruption, grinding poverty, runaway crime, coup d' etat) and small (cars parked on the lawns) that will not be to our liking.

Dizzy's alternative hypothesis, as I understand it, is that the Latino horde will easily assimilate to Anglo-Protestant norms of law and order once they come north. Let's see how that's working out. From the LA Weekly:

The Town the Law Forgot

An L.A. ’burb is mired in gangs, cartels and south-of-the-border-style politics

By Jeffrey Anderson

Cudahy resembles a Mexican border town more than it does a Los Angeles suburb. Entrenched gangs and Mexican drug trafficking have trapped working-class legal and illegal immigrants in a cycle of violence and fear, in a city where less than a quarter of the 28,000 residents are eligible to vote. An uneducated city council, a deeply troubled police force imported from Maywood two towns over, and the raw power of the 18th Street Gang — a complex criminal organization with a knack for setting up business fronts and obscuring underground drug activity — make Cudahy residents seem like hostages in their own city...

With its narrow, deep lots — the result of an agricultural past that is long gone — its glut of rundown apartment buildings and its lack of economic growth, Cudahy offers a good example of how Mexican drug cartels, the prison-based Mexican mafia and gangs like 18th Street are attracted to the Los Angeles–adjacent industrial sprawl populated by poor immigrants.

Spungen (to the extent I can extract an actual point amidst the hysteria) is certain that the epidemic of gang rape in South Africa has nothing at all to do with the fate of American women in the face of Hispanic immigration.

Narrowly speaking, this is probably true. So let's see what Hispanics do have in store for her. From the AP:

Mexico City Rolls Out Women-Only Buses

By OLGA R. RODRIGUEZ – 1 day ago

MEXICO CITY (AP) — Groping and verbal harassment is an exasperating reality for women using public transportation in this sprawling capital, where 22 million passengers cram onto subways and buses each day. Some men treat women so badly that the subway system has long had ladies-only cars during rush hour, with police segregating the sexes on the platforms.

Friday, January 25, 2008

It has been suggested, in some quarters, that it would be just peachy keen if white Americans became a minority in their own country. But Age-of-Treason (in the comments) has some anecdotes of what it was like for the white minority in the Superdome during Katrina:

A group of about 30 British students were among the very small number of whites in the stadium, where they spent four harrowing days. Jamie Trout, 22, an economics major, wrote that the scene “was like something out of Lord of the Flies,” with “people shouting racial abuse about us being white.” One night, word came that the power was failing, and that there was only ten minutes’ worth of gas for the generators. Zoe Smith, 21, from Hull, said they all feared for their lives: “All us girls sat in the middle while the boys sat on the outside, with chairs as protection,” she said. “We were absolutely terrified, the situation had descended into chaos, people were very hostile and the living conditions were horrendous.” She said that even during the day, “when we offered to help with the cleaning, the locals gave us abuse.”

Mr. Trout said the National Guard finally recognized how dangerous the threat was from blacks, and moved the British under guard to the basketball area, which was safer. “The army warned us to keep our bags close to us and to grip them tight,” he said, as they were escorted out. Twenty-year-old Jane Wheeldon credited one man in particular, Sgt. Garland Ogden, with getting the Britons safely out. “He went against a lot of rules to get us moved,” she said.

Australian tourists stuck in the Superdome had the same experience. Bud Hopes, a 32-year-old man from Kangaroo Point, Brisbane, took control and may have saved many lives. As the stadium reverted to anarchy he realized whites were in danger, and gathered tourists together for safety. “There were 65 of us altogether so we were able to look after each other, especially the girls who were being grabbed and threatened,” said Mr. Hopes. They organized escorts for women who had to go to the toilet or for food, and set up a roster of men to stand guard while others slept. “We sat through the night just watching each other, not knowing if we would be alive in the morning,” Mr. Hopes said. “Ninety-eight percent of the people around the world are good,” he said; “in that place 98 per cent of the people were bad.”

John McNeil of Coorparoo in Brisbane tells what happened to their group, too, heard the lights were about to go out: “I looked at Bud [Hopes] and said, ‘That will be the end of us.’ The gangs had already eyed us off. If the lights had gone out we would have been in deep trouble. We were sitting there praying for a miracle and the lights stayed on.” Mr. Hopes said the Australians owed their lives to a National Guardsman who broke the rules and got whites out to a medical center past seething crowds of blacks.

Peter McNeil of Brisbane told the Australian AP that his son John was one of the 65 who managed to get out. The blacks were reportedly so hostile “they would stab you as soon as look at you.” “He’s never been so scared in his life,” explained Mr. McNeil. “He just said they had to get out of the dark. Otherwise, another night, he said, they would have been gone.” No American newspaper wrote about what these white tourists had gone through.

Thursday, January 24, 2008

Not only was it absolutely irrelevant to a post about flags and sensitivity, it was deliberately offensive to female readers. Furthermore, it was racist. It is ridiculous to suggest the high rape rate in South Africa -- primarily of black women by black men -- is caused by whites being a minority in South Africa. It is absolutely unacceptable that you would use that sad situation in to support a snide, flippant suggestion that women in this country will face a rape epidemic by minorities due to immigration.

Here is what I wrote (comment deleted from bobvis):

But the question goes unanswered: what, if not lineage, defines us? On what grounds do we refer to ourselves as "a people" or "one nation"? Here again, if your answer is by something other than a set of racial and cultural norms (not homogeneity, mind you, but as the "expected value" of a distribution) then you are advancing a definition that is historically unprecedented.

But see, the circumstances that force us to have this discussion -- the presense in our midst of visible minorities with their own competing identies -- are bad enough. What happens when the minority becomes a majority?

To illustrate my point, a future majority of California, and perhaps the U.S., may one day fly the flag of Aztlan. But it is not in the rational self-interest of the present majority to choose that future among the alternatives available to us today. It IS in our interest to remain a majority in our own country, since the alternative, um, reallybites.

I subsequently allowed:

For what it is worth, I will concede, upon reflection, that the article about rape in South Africa was not as on point as it might have been.

Specifically, the article in question did not break out statistically the disproportionate threat of interracial gang rape suffered by white women. Since, in context, that was the only reason for linking to the article, I shouldn't have done it.

But let's not be quite so squeamishly Victorian about what the actual facts of rape are. From our own Bureau of Justice Statistics, Table 40:

Rape/Sexual Assault

Total offenses: 160,270

Percent by white perpetrators: 32.8

Percent by black perpetrators: 48.5

So it appears that, despite being only 14% of the population, blacks manage to commit almost a majority of rapes in America. Granted, most of these are intra-racial. But of those that are not (Table 42):

Rape/Sexual assault of Whites

Total # 111,490

Percent by White Perpetrator: 44.5%

Percent by Black Perpetrator: 33.6%

Rape/Sexual assault of Blacks

Total # 36,620

Percent by White Perpetrator: 0%

Percent by Black Perpetrator: 100%

Let's face it: I couldn't have made up statistics better (or, rather, worse) than this. Even though they are only 14% of the population, blacks still succeed in committing a third of all rapes of white women and 100% of all rapes of black women. If the Department of Justice is to be believed, white men did not rape a single black woman in all of 2005 (most recent data).

With more time, I could extrapolate this profile to the demographics of South Africa, and calculate the threat of rape to white women there.

But I'm not really . . . interested in South Africa. I am interested in the United States, and about the impact of hispanic immigration on all manner of social variables, including crime in, and including rape. Unfortunately, the DOJ has no racial category of "hispanic", so it's a lot harder answering the question about their present and future impact. The best estimate I can find so far is Jared Taylor's (yeah, I know, Jared-Taylor-big-scary-racist, so impeach the data, but in the mean time):

• Hispanics commit violent crimes at roughly three times the white rate.

This paper argues that the increase in young male incarceration rates played a significant role in the decline in teen birth rates during the 1990s. Using 1980, 1990, and 2000 Census microdata, I show that incarcerating one additional white (black) male is associated with 0.26 (0.11) fewer births to low-income white (black) teens per year. Relative to the average number of teen births fathered by young white (black) males per year, this is 5 (1.1) times higher. My results imply that the observed increase in male incarceration between 1980 and 2000 led to a 6% percent decline in teen fertility.

Sunday, January 20, 2008

In my latter high school years, I had the opportunity to attend a small private Christian School. One of the non-credit classes mandatory for all students was sex-ed, taught by the high school principal.

You might think that there would be little useful left for a tenth grader to learn about sex, expecially at a religious school, but such was my innocence (okay, ignorance) up to that time that the class did, in fact, clarify a number of the technical details. And before you ask, birth control techniques were discussed, but no condoms were distributed.

In addition to the technical and moral issues of sexuality, we had several lectures on the differences between men and women. And among these differences were those relating to both how we behave sexually and what we value in our dating and marriage partners.

In fairness, I should write carefully here when I describe what I "learned" in this class, because in all honesty I wore pretty heavy ideological blinders at the time. Specifically, one of my dominant paradigms relating to women was their moral superiority, and this was used to filter out a lot of what I heard. Years later, thinking about sex-ed, I was able to recall that, yes, our principal did say X, Y, and Z that agreed with my paradigm and therefore was readily integrated, but he also said P and Q which, had I not filtered it out, would have given me a more nuanced view of reality than the one I actually came away with.

For instance, one of the things the principal said was that women were monogamous, men less so. Put this way, as a generality, with due regard for outliers, I am pretty sure that few people of any politics would argue with the observation. However, given my paradigm, and given that I believed my own moral universalism to be, well, universal, I came away with the conviction that women valued chasity as a virtue; in other words, that they would respond positively to sexual restraint as a character trait, a general pattern of behavior.

This was a very different thing altogether, and whatever its veracity during my principal's generation, it did not, um, hold up well as a generality about the world I experienced after graduation. As so many men in my situation realize to our chagrin, when women say they value something like fidelity in a relationship, what they mean is that they want their men to be faithful to them. Not only does a man's prior promiscuity not bother them, it actually works to their advantage.

This can be tricky to apprehend. Despite their protestations that they want monogamous relationships, what they actually respond to are demonstrations of social status. Now I realize that the factors that buy social status (wealth, power, physicality, charm, etc.) manifest themselves in a variety of ways and are probably context-dependent. It is not my purpose here to comprehensively predict how all these add up in attracting women. But I will insist that, all else being equal, the ability to sexually attract women does constitute proof of status in the eyes of other women.

As moral particularists, women see nothing problematic in their ambition to marry James Bond. "Yes, my love," they say, "you may have spent a life bedding hotties around the world, but now you're mine, and I expect you to give up all that for me."

Consider also their oft-stated desire for kindness. This, too, I learned in high school; this, too, I interpreted as a desire for kindness in the abstract; and this, too, did not long survive contact with the wider world. For here again, when women actually mean is that they want their men to be kind to them; moral particularism. But what they respond to is dominance. Yes, in theory, dominance does not necessarily require harshness, cruelty, or mistreatment. But in practice, the Christian virtue, "blessed are the poor in spirit" is most assuredly NOT dominance. If the meek really do inherit the earth, it will be after all the women have left it.

I should at this point make clear that this post is not an assertion of male moral superiority by virtue of our moral univeralism. On the contrary, I am inclined to think that the differences between men and women have a purpose, whether viewed from an evolutionary or creationist perspective. In general, I am therefore reluctant to cast judgment on these differences. And specifically, I can appreciate the value of, and am indeed grateful for, the particularism of the women in my life: my wife and my mother. They have always been on my side in any outside conflict, indeed, they are more my partisans than I am. I am much more inclined to see misfortune as my own fault, while they are quick to point to the mistakes and malice of others.

But I will say this: in the examples shown above, women may be poorly served by their particularism as they go about the process of finding a mate. Yes, it's possiblethat the rake will domesticate, as it is possible that the tyrant will become gentle. But women need to more honestly evaluate the likelihood that these sudden reversals of character will occur and stick. Because in truth, absent a life-changing religious conversion (and even then), these character changes are seldom so dramatic, and often reverse under the inevitable stresses of life and marriage, and for women to believe otherwise is often an exercise in wishful thinking.

Update: In the comments, Trumwill says:

I'd love to see some numbers.

Here are a couple of scholarly treatments:

"The Social Organization of Sexualty", by Edward O. Laumann, is "the complete findings from America's most comprehensive survey of sexual behavior." Laumann, a professor at the University of Chicago, finds that compared to those who marry as virgins, men are 63 percent more likely and women 76 percent more likely to divorce if they have had sex before marriage.

"Premarital Sex and the Risk of Divorce", by Joan R. Kahn and Kathryn A. London, Journal of Marriage and the Family,, Vol. 53, No. 4 (Nov., 1991), Kahn (University of Maryland, College Park) and London (National Center for Health Statistics) find that individuals who engage in premarital sexual activity are 50 percent more likely to divorce later in life than those who remained abstinent prior to their marriage.

There are also many non-scholarly examinations:

"Not Just Friends", by Shirley Glass. Google's book view doesn't include this particular chapter, but Glass has been quoted elsewhere to the effect that pre-marital sex increases the odds of infidelity.

Christianity Today did a random survey of its subscribers and found that those who had engaged in sex before marriage were more likely to commit adultery than those who had no premarital sexual experience.

Physicians For Life (see finding #9) assert that the research supports a positive correlation between premarital sexual activity and infidelity, but do not offer citiations.

The more-narrow link between pre-marital cohabitation and the likelihood of divorce has also been examined. Among the professional literature:

"Sexual exclusivity among dating, cohabiting, and married women", by Renata Forste and Koray Tanfer, Journal of Marriage & the Family, v58n1 (Feb 1996): 33-47 ISSN: 0022-2445 Number: 02878128. Forste (Brigham Young University) and Tanfer (University of Washington) find that women that had cohabited before marriage were 3.3 times more likely to have a secondary sex partner after marriage. So I guess men have to consider this factor, too, not just women.

Friday, January 18, 2008

Steven Pinker's NYT article, "The Moral Instinct," which draws heavily from Jonathan Haidt's work published in the Journal of Social Justice Research. Half Sigma provides the upshot:

Mr. Haidt’s hypothesis is that there are five dimensions of morality: harm (don’t harm others), fairness, loyalty to one’s group, respect for authority, and purity. Furthermore, his theory is that liberals only understand harm and fairness, while conservatives value all dimensions of morality. You can read a more detailed academic article if you are curious.

Ross Douthat and Jim Manzi provide excellent commentary. I was initially impressed with Haidt's model, but in the interests of evenness, I set about trying to break it anyway.

Do liberals have loyalty?

I remembered this story about a significant bisexual subculture at Stuyvesant High School:

Alair is headed for the section of the second-floor hallway where her friends gather every day during their free tenth period for the “cuddle puddle,” as she calls it. There are girls petting girls and girls petting guys and guys petting guys. She dives into the undulating heap of backpacks and blue jeans and emerges between her two best friends, Jane and Elle, whose names have been changed at their request. They are all 16, juniors at Stuyvesant. Alair slips into Jane’s lap, and Elle reclines next to them, watching, cat-eyed. All three have hooked up with each other. All three have hooked up with boys—sometimes the same boys.

Good grief: high school! I mean, can't we keep this kind of thing on premium cable where it belongs?

To these kids, homophobia is as socially shunned as racism was to the generation before them. They say it’s practically the one thing that’s not tolerated at their school. One boy who made disparaging remarks about gay people has been ridiculed and taunted, his belongings hidden around the school. “We’re a creative bunch when we hate someone,” says Nathan.

So it seems liberals have no shortage of ingroup loyalty, even at the expense of the official liberal virtues of care and reciprocity (not to mention authority). Although, I suppose it could be argued that this particular display of solidarity has nothing to do with morality. Indeed, the "cuddle puddle" seems to share the motivation of little boys that pull the legs off spiders: it's fun to torment those that can't fight back.

Do liberals have purity?

Again in reference to the story above: if we take at face value the outrage -- outrage! -- expressed at intolerance, we see a concern for purity: we mustn't sully our society with intollerant thoughtcrime such as this.

The modern environmental movement has a whiff of purity about it, eg. we mustn't sully ANWR with oil exploration, for instance; more generally, nature must remain "pristine"; ie. uncontaminated by human activity. Michael Crichton has written about this.

Do liberals have authority?

Tough call. Liberals love authority in Castro's Cuba and Kim's North Korea, but they have little appetite to actually live there themselves. They might profess deference to the authority of SCOTUS, for instance, or "science", but this is transparently offered in bad faith. Sure, when James Watson says that mankind evolved from common stock with apes, liberals are all about the authority of science. But when Watson says that we evolved differently than Africans, authority quickly loses out to purity -- thoughtcrime! -- in the condemnations that follow. Liberals tell us that we must defer to the scientific community about global warming, but not about the Yucca nuclear waste depository.

Thursday, January 17, 2008

Bobvis withdraws support for Ron Paul over the latters skepticism regarding evolution:

I still find his anti-evolutionary stance disturbing. People who are against evolution typically fail to meet Yudkowsky's virtue of evenness. They will accept plate tectonics and even quantum physics without evidence, but once they hear something about evolution they become these pretend critical thinkers who want to examine all the evidence before they get too hasty in believing something.

Bobvis, and Yudkowsky, make an important point about how confirmation bias shapes are approach to this question and others like it. But the thing is, though, nobody ever asked me if I "believe" in plate tectonics. Come to think of it, I can't recall anybody speaking about any scientific theory in terms of belief and acceptance. People only talk this way when they discuss religion . . . and evolution!

Which brings me to the heart of what I find so irritating about the framing of this issue. Bobvis here appears to credit those professing evolution with scientific thinking. But as he concedes, very, very few people think scientifically about anything in the way Bobvis defines it, and for a very good reason: evolutionarily speaking, scientific thinking only recently emerged. We aren't much evolved to think scientifically.

However, we are evolved to think in terms of religious/philosophical commitments as expressions of ingroup solidarity. When the average adherent says, "I believe in evolution," he is not saying that he has studied all the empirical evidence and found evolution to best account for it and yield the most fruitful direction for future investigation. He is expressing solidarity with:

(1) philosophical materialism, because he wants a world unencumbered by transcendent ethics; or

(2) "science", because that's what right-thinking people do.

In Bobvis' words:

For many people (most?), their "belief" in evolution is intellectually indistinguishable from religious belief. "Evolution" is just a password that does not have any real meaning behind it. They might as well be saying the word "magic". Or "oorf". It isn't that much more virtuous to blindingly accept the authority of scientists than it is to blindingly accept the authority of religious texts.

Not all those professing evolution would agree with what's bolded above. John Derbyshire and Lee Harris, to name two, with no pretense of encouraging scientific thinking, have explicitly advocating "catechizing" school children in evolution (the password approach to learning), in deference to scientific authority. (Lee Harris, it should be noted, is a Christian.)

If we don't all think scientifically (and I see no near-term prospect of this happening), what role should authority play? In their competing claims to deference, science takes credit for a lot of really cool stuff:

Penicillin;

Space travel;

H-bombs;

X-box.

Christianity gives us:

the organizing principle of Western Civilization*;

a trancendent moral order;

the best paintings ever;

the birth of science.

It occurs to me that neither of these lists have anything to do with evolution. They don't have much to do with each other at all actually, which is as it should be: I don't want my clergymen making pronouncements about heliocentrism, nor my scientists holding forth on effectual calling.

But we are still left with two competing creation myths. In the beginning . . .

God created the heavens and the earth . . .

there was a soupy sea of amino acids . . .

I do not anticipate resolving this conflict to anyone's satisfaction, even my own. But I do want to address the question of whether any of this matters in a president.

Understand first that none of this has anything to do with anyone's ability to apprehend empirical evidence. It has everything to do with group solidarity in our cultural war, and to which authority we defer in propagating our creation myth.

I speculate the following:

that the universal approbation of evolution among Democratic candidates is an expression of fealty to a materialist worldview and its policy goals;

that the similiar approbation of several Republican candidates is an expression of deference to science on what they see as a narrow scientific question; and

that the rejection of evolution of the balance of Republican candidates is an expression of deference to the Christian Bible on what they see as a religious question and fealty to the policy goals of a Christian worldview.

What the policy implications? Groups 1 and 3, above, are taking sides in the culture war, with all that this entails. Hypothetically, I would concede an advantage to either group 1 and 2 if their understanding of evolution leads them, as it leads me, to turn a cold eye to our policy of allowing peoples evolved to alien physical and social conditions to take up residence among peoples evolved to the conditions of northern Europe; sadly, none of these candidates mean it that way.

Monday, January 07, 2008

Trumwill posted a story that, if I had heard it on Limbaugh, I wouldn't have believed it. Look, I despise liberals too, but would the good liberals administering child support laws in Los Angeles County really enforce a child support judgment against a patently innocent man?

Um, well . . . yes, as it turned out. And a narrow, technical reading of California law allows them to do just that. So what's to be done?

I feel my paradigms shifting without a clutch. When SCOTUS declares CO2 to be a "pollutant" even though Congress didn't, or when it goes on about "penumbras of emanations" and whatnot, then obviously judicial activism attenuates our democracy. But judicial restraint presupposes that the other branches of government will work, not necessarily competently, but at least without the brazen disregard for truth and justice as shown in this case.

I know: nobody will ever care about my PhD GPA. Still . . . after spending most of last semester (and the first day of this one) thinking I was going to flunk out, it's nice to have some positive feedback: A in Linear Algebra, A- in Green's functions.